


The Stay

by Odyle



Category: Longmire (TV)
Genre: F/M, Hurt/Comfort
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-12-20
Updated: 2012-12-20
Packaged: 2017-11-21 15:26:32
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,752
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/599333
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Odyle/pseuds/Odyle
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>There is a truth that Walt Longmire is doing his best not to see.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Stay

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Muir_Wolf](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Muir_Wolf/gifts).



> Thank you to both of my betas. This story and myself would have been a mess if you two had not been there.

Ruby repeated herself twice before Walt decided that she wasn't kidding and hurried to put his boots on. 

He had been enjoying a leisurely morning of doing anything in particular. Days off where he did nothing in particular were not uncommon, but he cherished them all the same. Being the sheriff of the least populous county in the United States was not the most eventful position, but it did provide him with enough diversion that he didn't go looking for any in his free time. His only plan had been to have dinner at the Red Pony and maybe a beer or two, but even that was more of an inevitability than anything else.. 

As an afterthought, Walt grabbed the copy of _The Old Curiosity Shop_ in case he had to wait long for Vic to be released. He tossed the paperback down on the passenger side and took off for the hospital in Durant. They had put her in a room by the time he arrived at the hospital. She agreed to stay only after they gave her a private room and a chocolate pudding cup. 

The patient was quietly resting and watching Wheel of Fortune when he found her. 

"Are you here to spring me?" Vic asked. 

"I don't know. You look pretty comfy."

Someone had pulled all of the window shades shut and turned the lights down. Vic had ratcheted the bed up to a seated position so she could watch the contestants and consume her pudding, while still enjoying the ice pack set on top of her head. 

Vic’s hair was pulled back with a black scrunchie, revealing the spot along her right temple where her head had met the concrete of the steps. The skin was red and starting to darken. She would have an impressive bruise in a day's time. 

Ruby had assured him that Vic was fine on the phone, but it hadn't done anything against the anxiety of hearing that she was in the hospital. It was a comfort to have her there beside him, obviously well enough to be bored and cranky.

"Looks can be deceiving,"Vic said.

"I doubt they've been torturing you. From what the nurses tell me, it was you that was giving them a hard time." 

According to the head nurse, Vic was a much more difficult patient than she had been the last time she had had occasion to enjoy the services of Durant Regional Hospital. On her previous visit, Vic had been well sedated. Today, Vic came around in the ambulance on the way to the hospital. She had allowed the nurses to put a heart monitor on, but refused to have an IV inserted, even if it was just for saline. After some argument, the nurses had given up and provided Vic with a glass of water and instructions to drink one an hour or else she would get the IV. 

"If you're here to scold me, you can go home, Walt. It was just a little bump. But I’ve been a good little deputy, so they should set me free soon.” Vic delicately scraped the inside of the pudding cup with her plastic spoon, gathering a little bit of pudding along the rim. "It's just a concussion," Vic swore. "I'm fine." 

"That's up to Doctor Bloomfield to say."

Walt set his hat down on one of the chairs in the room. He dragged it up next to the bed so he could see the TV screen and sat down beside Vic to wait.

\---

She had lost her footing coming down the front steps of the library and slipped, knocking her head as she tumbled down. As the Ferg recounted to him later, it had all seemed to happen in slow motion. Vic turned her head to look at something down the street and missed a step. It wasn’t unheard of for people to trip on the stairs. The building was old and the steps had worn smooth and uneven in some places after a hundred years of traffic. Vic hadn't fallen far, but it had been enough to frighten the Ferg, who had Ruby call an ambulance when he reached Vic at the bottom of the stairs and found that not only was she unconscious, but that he couldn’t wake her when he shook her.

\---

Dr. Bloomfield appeared just after noon. Vic and Walt had been watching the 12 o’clock news out of Cheyenne and talking about an upcoming marksmanship competition in Cody when the doctor knocked on the door.

Walt wanted to stay, but Vic sent him to the hospital cafeteria for another pudding cup. It was a private conversation and she was still hungry, besides. She'd been on the way to breakfast with the Ferg when she had taken the tumble and hadn't had anything but the one pudding cup since dinner the day before. He wandered down the long sterile hallways of the hospital until he came to the cafeteria. At mid-morning, there were few people inside, except for a few staff members enjoying coffee and preparing for the early lunch crowd. Walt went down the line and took two pudding cups off the buffet: lemon and chocolate. He wasn't sure that Vic would want chocolate twice. If she did, he could just eat the other. 

Dr. Bloomfield was still inside when he returned and though the door was open, Walt stopped and leaned against the wall outside her room to wait until the doctor was finished consulting with Vic. 

“Walt,” Vic called. “You can come in now.” 

He hadn’t known she had seen him peek inside the room.

“Tell Walt that I’m fine,” Vic said, reaching out for the chocolate pudding cup. 

“It is a minor concussion,” Dr. Bloomfield agreed. “But that does not mean that you should not act as if you are well. You need complete rest for a day, two if it can be done.” 

“I’ll make sure she gets it.” 

“You heard him, doc,” Vic said. “He’ll make sure I don’t move a muscle.” 

“I didn’t mean it that way, Vic.” 

“So you’re not going to cook me home meals and rub my feet?”

Walt looked to Dr. Bloomfield for some advice or support--at least some sympathy. 

“I’m kidding,” Vic said as she picked up a spoonful of pudding.

\---

When Walt awoke, _The Price is Right_ had done off and a court show had come on. Vic was still in bed. She watched the people on the screen, spinning around the empty pudding cup with one finger on the bedside table.

"How long was I asleep?"

"A few hours," Vic said. "I figured I had made you miss your afternoon nap. Feeling well rested?" 

Walt stretched. His back ached from sleeping sitting up. 

"Dr. Bloomfield said I can go home soon. They're working on the discharging me." Vic reached for the bag at the end of the bed. "Could you tell me how the case turns out? I've got to go get changed." 

Walt nodded and turned his attention to the TV judge shouting down the plaintiff, who was blushing furiously, while Vic climbed out of bed and went into the small bathroom. It was Ruby who had brought the bag, Walt decided when Vic emerged dressed in jeans and a sweater. Vic would have picked something more comfortable for herself. 

“You ready?” Vic asked. She readjusted the bag on her shoulder. Walt considered asking to carry it, but didn’t want to insult Vic. Pissing her off regularly was a bad idea. Pissing her off while she was in pain seemed doubly unwise. 

“Don’t you want to stay and watch?” Walt asked, motioning at the screen. 

“I do,” Vic said. “But not as much as I want to get out of here. Get your hat.” 

“Yes, ma’am.”

\---

He bundled her into the Bronco and took her home. That was, to his home. It was a natural reaction. He didn't think of driving to Vic to the apartment where she was living or offering to take her somewhere else. Walt pulled out of the hospital parking lot and immediately headed for home.

Vic, for her part, didn't say anything about it. She rode beside him in silence, staring out the passenger side window with her aviator sunglasses on, watching the world roll by. He knew that she didn't have anybody out here. Her husband--soon to be ex in a few weeks time--had already moved to the post in Australia. It was hard for Walt to keep up with where the man had been sent. Vic wouldn't have wanted to have him care for her even if he had still been around. She didn't have many friends, at least not any that Walt was aware of, outside of the sheriff's office. 

It made him feel better to have her there with him, where he knew she would be fine.

\---

He stepped up onto the front porch, then turned to hold out a hand to Vic.

"You still haven't put in the steps?" she asked as she concentrated on making the step without his help, though she put a hand on his shoulder to steady herself when she had both feet safely on the porch. 

Walt ignored the comment. Though he had meant to do it - indeed, he had meant to do it for several years - he had never found the time and the lack of stairs had become normal in his life. He placed Vic on the couch and covered her with a quilt, then put her bag on the coffee table. 

"So," Vic said. "What are we going to do?" 

"Doc Bloomfield said that you're supposed to get some rest and to keep drinking fluids."

One of the nurses had handed Vic a paper with aftercare instructions when she was checking out of the hospital. Vic had jammed the paper in her bag without looking at it, but Walt had rescued it and read it over. When he’d absorbed it, he neatly folded the paper and slipped it in his back pocket for reference. 

"Can I have a beer?"

"You're not supposed to have alcohol." 

"What do you have that's not alcohol?" 

Walt thought for a long moment. "Water?" 

"Water? You sure know how to impress a girl." Vic slumped back on the sofa and took her sunglasses off. 

He took a Rainier out of the fridge for himself and filled a glass for her. 

"What do you do for fun?" Vic asked as he handed her the glass. He settled down in the armchair across from the couch. It was a good vantage point for watching her, but not being too close. 

"Read, most of the time."

"Well then, what are my options?" 

"What do you mean?" 

"My head hurts too much to read, but that doesn't mean that I can't listen to you read. So what's it gonna be, sheriff?" 

"Have you ever read _The Old Curiosity Shop_?" 

"The what?" 

Walt went to retrieve it from his truck. He had tossed it into the back while clearing off the seat so Vic would have a clear place to sit on their way home. 

"You ready?" Walt asked as he returned to his chair across from Vic. 

"Bring it on." 

"'Night is generally my time for walking," Walt read. "In the summer I often leave home early in the morning, and roam about fields and lanes all day, or even escape for days or weeks together..."

Vic was quiet as he read. At the end of the second chapter, Walt looked up find that she had fallen asleep. He set the book down, careful to mark his place with a coaster from The Red Pony. Asleep, she appeared to be completely relaxed. It was an uncommon sight in recent months. The stress of the divorce had made her tense and difficult to get along with at times. She and Branch had almost come to blows twice. Walt found himself biting his tongue and sending her on errands that would have usually fallen to Branch. 

It was greedy of him, but he looked forward to Vic being divorced. Walt missed the old Vic.

\---

Walt called Henry to let him know that he wouldn't be visiting.

"I was not expecting you," Henry said. His voice stood out just barely from the background noise of the bar. It was a busy night at The Red Pony. Loud happy drunks and music provided an awful clutter of sound that Walt struggled to hear through. 

"But I hadn't called to cancel." 

"But a little bird told me that a certain deputy had taken a fall." 

"How would you get me canceling from that?" 

“I know you, Walt. I know where your priorities lie.” 

“What do you mean?” 

"We'll talk about it later," Henry said. 

"Tell me."

"I will give you this to ponder--why were you the one that got the call to pick Vic up from the hospital and why did you come running?" 

"I didn't run," Walt said. 

"Of course you didn't. Night, Walt"

"Night, Henry."

\---

Walt cooked a TV dinner for each of them.

"Why does a man who doesn't have a TV have TV dinners?" 

"Sometimes I don't like to cook." 

They drank while they talked. They spoke of many things. Predictions for the winter that would soon be upon them. The Ferg’s latest addition to his car. Their favorite beers.

"So, how's the divorce?" Walt asked. Their previous conversation about Walt's lack of computer skills had lagged. The look Vic gave him told him that she expected that he would be the one to bring up the next subject of conversation. Her divorce was the first thing that came to mind.

"You sure you want to talk about it?" 

"I asked, didn't I?"

"Alright, Mr. Gruff. It's irreconcilable." 

"That bad, huh?"

"I'm just glad it's almost over," Vic said.

"At least that's good." 

"I don't know how good it is. At least with the alimony check I'll be making a living wage." 

Walt wasn’t quite sure how to respond, so he took the brave route and turned his attention to his beer. 

“Still kidding,” Vic said.

\---

When it came time for bed, Walt insisted that Vic take the bed even though there were no clean sheets to put on it. Vic insisted that she be allowed to sleep on the couch.

"I'm probably going to have to get up in the middle of the night. I don't want to wake you up." 

He'd been matching her, a beer to each glass of water that she drank. As the night wore on, he could tell that he was drunk. Vic laughed at him and he didn't mind. Walt rocked on his feet when he stood to go to bed. 

"You need some help there?" Vic asked from the couch. 

"No, I've got it." 

"There's no shame in asking for help." 

Vic smirked at him. 

"There are a lot of things I've needed help with in my life. Getting from my living room to my bedroom is not one of them."

\---

The sound of footsteps woke him from a particularly vivid dream. His truck had been spinning out on an iced over highway. It defied physics in his dream, spinning on and on, until the dream was no longer stressful, just aggravating. He could recall wanting to get back on the road to a dispatch from the Ferg about a dead dog, but being helpless to do so as his truck revolved down the highway.

He turned over to see the bedroom door open and Vic slip inside. So far as he could tell, he was a little drunk from knocking back so many beers, but he wasn’t seeing things at least.

“Don’t say anything,” Vic muttered as she slipped into bed beside him.

“I wasn’t going to.”

Walt turned over onto his side, facing away from her. Given the circumstances, it was the respectful thing to do.

“For the record, it is freezing in the living room. That glass of water? The top is iced over. How do you even live here? And don’t give me that simple living bullshit. This is the 21st century, not ye olden times.”

“It never bothered me,” Walt said. He had noticed that it was chilly in the house at night if he wasn’t underneath the mound of quilts that covered his bed, but it hadn’t bothered him enough to move him to action. The chill had been one of those abstract things he would deal with one day, like getting a trashcan or insulating the attic.

“Well, the rest of us demand things like indoor heating.”

Vic settled on her side with her back to Walt. The quilts on the queen bed hung between them, letting cool air into the hollow between their bodies.

It was strange to have someone beside him in bed again. It wasn’t that he had grown used to sleeping alone. He had been a married man many more years than he’d been a widower. From so many years of sharing a bed, he knew Martha. He knew how far the mattress dipped when she climbed into the bed and that she would steal the covers if given half a chance. Vic was different. With his back turned, he could still tell that there was an intruder in the bed, even if she was welcome.

In truth, he felt a bit guilty about it. Strange thoughts, the feeling that he was being unfaithful, came to mind unbidden. Cady and Henry and everyone else who had felt moved to weigh in on the subject were right: his wife wouldn’t have wanted him to live this way. He wouldn’t have expected this of her either. If he had been the one who had died first, the only scenario he had ever envisioned, he would have expected her to remarry again as soon as she’d found someone. She would have been able to move on with her life, and would not have left things half complete in a sad memorial to a happier time. Martha had always been a better person.

Funny enough that he had another woman next to him in bed, regardless of the circumstances, and all he could think of was Martha and how she would feel about Victoria Moretti. 

Death and divorce were two different things, but both were endings. Vic would would rebound from her divorce. Soon enough Vic Moretti would be a free woman. She would be ready to move on as soon as the ink on the divorce papers dried while he still had trouble thinking of himself beyond the misery he had been wallowing in.

Vic’s weight shifted as she rolled over onto her back.

“Walt?”

Walt lay there in silence, hoping she’d think he’d fallen asleep. This was rewarded with a sharp jab between the shoulderblades. He groaned and rolled over to face her.

“What, Vic?”

She started to speak, but swallowed her first word. “Nothing,” Vic said, rolling back onto her side. “Night.”

\---

He awoke alone in bed when he woke up the next morning. Someone had slept in the other side, but there were no hints as to the current location of that person, so he got up and dressed, then went to look for Vic. She had only gone as far as the kitchen where he found her engaged in battle with the coffee maker.

“Does nothing in this house work,” she demanded as she attempted to force a filter full of coffee back into the machine rather than gently guiding it as Walt had learned to do.

“You’ve got to be patient.” In his hands, the coffee filter fit down into the machine and was soon working to brew a pot for them to share. They stood there before it, considering the coffee maker.

“Are you supposed to have caffeine?” 

“Do you care?” Vic asked. 

He did mind, but not enough to get into it with Vic. 

Walt got them each a mug from the cabinet, then retrieved eggs and butter from the fridge. 

“What’s on the menu?” Vic asked. She pounced on the coffee maker as soon as it was ready, stopping only to pour a little milk into her mug before gulping down a cup. 

“Scrambled eggs and toast.”

“What about an omelette?” 

“I can make an omelette, but it won’t have anything in it but egg.” 

“What about French toast?” 

“No cinnamon or syrup.” 

“Scrambled eggs and toast it is then.” 

Vic wandered back to the coffee maker to top off her cup. She poured a cup for Walt while the pot was off the cradle. Vic placed the coffee cup beside the egg carton where Walt could sip it between stirs of the eggs. 

“I’m glad it was you, Walt. It means a lot to me that you dropped everything and came for me. It would mean a lot of me if anyone did it... but I’m glad that it was you.” 

Walt was glad too that he had been the one to be there with her. Vic was a grown woman and could take care of herself. It was that she had let him be there with her and take care of her, the little that she allowed. Here was a closeness between them that he had not recognized before, nor did he care to examine more closely. She was Vic and she was his deputy. 

She watched him as he cooked the eggs, gently stirring so they would not burn. It was hard to say where Vic thought things stood between them. She seemed to treat him as a close ally sometimes, while at other times more formally. He was probably to blame for it, Walt reckoned, but the situation was odd all around. It was hard to be a mentor when he was plagued with feelings that were not exactly typical of a mentor toward a mentee. 

“I wasn’t doing much,” Walt said. 

Vic rolled her eyes.

“I’m trying to be honest and you’re doing that thing where you don’t want to talk about feelings.” 

“Maybe I don’t want to. Can you get some plates?”

Vic took two plates from the cabinet and set them down where Walt could reach them. 

“But I want to talk about feelings. It would probably be best if you would talk about feelings with me too, otherwise it is just going to be me talking about my feelings and that’s not very productive.” 

“Productive?” 

“Are you going to talk about feelings, or not?” 

“You’ve obviously got something to say.” 

Vic took a long sip of coffee, staring at Walt over the rim of the mug. 

“Last night, what was that?” 

It was a question he might have asked himself, but hadn’t had the presence of mind to when Vic had climbed in beside him. 

“You were sick, Vic, and as you pointed out, there’s no heating in the front room at night.” 

“But I climbed into bed with you, Walt. And you didn’t kick me out.” 

“You were sick.” 

“But it isn’t just that. You came as soon as you heard I was in the hospital. You brought me pudding, Walt.”

“You’re my deputy, Vic. I care about you.” 

“Yeah, but how do you care about me? Because, to be honest, sometimes it doesn’t feel like this is just a sheriff-deputy thing. Last night was one of those times.”

“How I feel about you doesn’t really matter. You’re still a married woman and my deputy.” 

“So you do like me.”

There it was. She was distinctly smirking behind the rim of the coffee cup. 

“Of course I like you, Vic. But that doesn’t matter.” 

“Yes, it does. It isn’t like anyone would give a shit if the sheriff hooked up with one of his deputies. The dating pool is not exactly big in this county.” 

There were reasons he hadn’t wanted to talk about it. Good reasons. In particular, the way Vic smiled with her eyes when she knew that she was right 

“This is why I didn’t want to talk about it.”

“Whatever. You like me. Does this mean you’re going to ask me out after my divorce gets finalized?” 

“Vic?”

“Yeah, Walt?”

“Just drop it.”

\---

Vic rode into Durant with him. Her unit was still in the parking lot at the station and it was his day on duty. She drank coffee from his thermos on the ride.

“Don’t you think you should slow down?” Walt asked. 

“Are you kidding me? I didn’t have any yesterday. For all I know it wasn’t a concussion, just a bad caffeine headache.” 

He let her drink it, knowing that there was coffee and a mug proclaiming him to be “The World’s Best Sheriff” waiting in the office .Ruby brewed good coffee. Of course, she also bought much better coffee than what Walt kept around for himself. That Vic would even drink it was proof enough of her desperation. 

Vic didn’t mention anything about their conversation from earlier that morning. He had been concentrating on not thinking about it, a task at which he was failing, in part because she was sitting beside him in his unit. It was difficult to think about the reasons why not when the reason why was sitting right there beside him. 

Ruby was at the front desk when they arrived at the Absaroka County Sheriff’s Office. She was the only one to greet them as Branch slept at his desk. 

“How are you?” she asked, hustling out from behind her desk to put her arms around Vic, who gave Ruby a quick tight hug. 

“She’s back to herself,” Walt said and breezed past the two women and off to his office. There was nothing urgent back there for him to do. 

He was flipping through an old case file, one that was going to court soon, when Ruby finally knocked with his messages from the past day. 

“You got a call from Cady, she wants to know if you can come over this weekend and help her replace the light switch in her bathroom.”

“Tell her to call Henry.” 

“I did, but she insisted that I still ask you. You also got a call from the prosecutor in Cheyenne to make sure that you remember that you have go down there on the fifth.” 

“I remember,” Walt said, picking up the file to show her the name on the label. 

“There’s one more thing.” 

Ruby went to the door and, very carefully, closed it. He caught a glimpse of Vic leaning over to peer in just as the door shut. Ruby walked over and sat in one of the chairs in front of his desk. 

“How did things go last night?” she asked. 

Walt stopped. He looked up again from the file to consider Ruby. They had known each other for a long time. She had started back when Lucien Connally had been sheriff the same as him, only a few years later. Ruby was a good friend and for the most part she stayed out of his business. However, there were some times when she seemed compelled to get involved in his personal life. 

“What do you mean?” 

“Not good? Poor sweetheart.” 

“Who’re you calling ‘sweetheart’?” 

“I didn’t mean you, I meant Vic.” 

“What are you pitying Vic for?” 

“I was hoping that you two would be able to work things out.”

“What is there to work out?”

Ruby looked down at the notes still in her hand. Once she had announced them to Walt, she usually balled them up and tossed them in his trash can unless she had taken notes on a response. Today, she held onto them. 

“It is obvious you’ve got a thing for a certain deputy,” Ruby said, her voice lowered even though Walt was very certain that no one outside could hear them. “You’re just too stubborn to do anything about it.” 

“I don’t have a _thing_ for Vic.” 

He picked up a page from the crime report, hoping to end the conversation. As little as he wanted to talk with Vic about feelings, he wanted to talk to Ruby about his feelings for Vic even less. 

“You say that now, Walt Longmire, but you better watch your back. If you don’t do something soon, she’s going to.”

“Nothing’s going on, Ruby.” 

She leaned forward and gave Walt a pat on his hand.

“You just tell yourself that,” Ruby said.


End file.
